Les formes symboliques de la science : le cas des photographies numériques de Laurent Lamarche

Abstract

The main focus of this contribution is based on formal and semantic effects related to the use of digital devices in artistic creation, more specifically the digital photos of the Canadian artist Laurent Lamarche, whose visual grammar is inspired by technoscience and molecular biology. Due to their resemblance to the cells and their apparent scientificity, the question we are asking is : can we qualified his works as symbolic forms of science ? To try to answer this interrogation we first present the plastic universe of the artist. After we briefly review the definition of the symbolic form proposed by Ernst Cassirer and we finally analyze the corpus of images under the light of the triadic model of the sign defined by Charles Sander Peirce who differentiates indices, icons and symbols.

Keywords

• digital art
• biology
• science
• symbolic form
• technique